In Anaheim, whatever fight was left in the Ducks’ lineup seems to have fizzled out.
On Sunday, Marc-Andre Fleury made 33 saves and the Vegas Golden Knights defeated Anaheim, 5-2.
“We can put a fresh goalie in there every night,” Golden Knights head coach Peter DeBoer said. “We’re getting great goaltending from both guys.”
Mark Stone potted a goal and picked up two points in the win, it was his fourth straight game with multiple points.
“We didn’t play from behind,” Stone said. “I think that’s the key to these last few games.”
Max Comtois and Danton Heinen were the Ducks’ goal scorers.
“We were better energy-wise,” Ducks head coach Dallas Eakins said. “That’s just an excellent team over there with all the depth that they have and the experience.”
Max Pacioretty and Nicolas Roy added to the Vegas score sheet with a goal and two points apiece.
“We have a really good bottom six as well, so we can contribute offensively,” Roy said. “It’s been good to get those goals and help those guys up in the top six.”
Alex Pietrangelo scored for the Knights in the first period to give them a 2-1 lead.
“Everybody is contributing on a different night,” Stone said. “We’re getting balance throughout the 12 forwards. For five, six games [the top six forwards] were struggling and [the bottom six] were the ones that kept us going.”
Alex Tuch added an empty-net goal for the icing on the game.
John Gibson made 24 saves in the loss.
“The unfortunate thing is, we talk about it a lot, every moment in the game is critical,” Eakins said. “We had a guy jump too early on a line change and we missed an assignment on our penalty kill. It’s too bad, because our penalty kill has been on quite a run lately (23 of 26, 88.5 percent past seven games), and those two moments were critical.
“We had just scored to come back in the game to make it a one-goal game and, boom, two mental mistakes and now you’ve got to play two-goal catch-up against an elite team.”
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